Besides having a passion for serving our country and its citizens through broad dissemination of Department of Energy R&D results, Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) employees are also committed to giving back to their local, national, and global communities in other ways.

Similar to many employer-supported charitable giving campaigns, there is an annual effort across the U.S. Federal Government known as the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). OSTI has participated for many years, with a high percentage of employees donating each campaign season. The CFC was created in 1961 to coordinate the fundraising efforts of various charitable organizations, which must demonstrate standards of transparency and effectiveness in order to participate in the campaign. Federal employees continue to make the CFC the largest and most successful workplace philanthropic fundraiser in the world. The CFC is structured with 125 local campaigns that organize the annual fundraising effort. OSTI is part of the Smoky Mountain Region Combined Federal Campaign. In 2016, OSTI employees donated thousands of dollars to local, national, and international organizations.

David Mandrus shows a model of the perovskite crystal structure. Image Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

An exciting race is underway in the field of solar energy to develop a commercially viable material for solar cells to capture the sun’s rays and produce cheap, abundant solar energy for the planet. A class of materials called perovskites has recently emerged that researchers believe promises to be the winner in this solar energy race. According to scientists at Ames Laboratory, perovskites are, “optically active, semiconducting compounds that are known to display intriguing electronic, light-emitting and chemical properties,” with lead-halide perovskites now one of the most favorable semiconductors for solar cells because of their, “low cost, easier processability and high power conversion efficiencies.” Perovskite materials are now considered to be the future of solar cells and are playing a role in next-generation electric batteries, sensors, lasers, fuel cells, memory devices, spintronics, and other applications.

We posed that question to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers across the complex in an effort to continue making our scientific and technical information (STI) tools and services best in class. The answers we received were both enthusiastic and enlightening: to be most useful, a modern DOE software platform must connect researchers in meaningful ways to their software, data, and research documents; embrace open source; not duplicate but complement existing community practices and platforms; provide for social coding; and enable social media that incorporates sharing and notification systems for software news and updates as well as links to author profiles.

We at the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) are happy to announce that this platform, called DOE Code, is now under planning and development.

Why is this important to DOE?

Software is a critical form of STI and instrumental to scientific research. It allows scientists to achieve day-to-day tasks, perform complex modeling and simulation, execute big data analytics, and control some of the largest scientific instruments in the world; in other words, software is essential to every aspect of modern scientific research.

Quantum dots are tiny particles of semiconductor materials that are only a few nanometers in size. These tiny but mighty particles have immense potential because of their flexibility and highly tunable properties. Since they are so small, their optical and electronic properties behave quite differently from those of larger particles. They obey quantum-mechanics laws. They can be synthesized on-demand with nearly atomic precision. They emit extremely pure light that differs in color, depending on their size. They can be suspended in solutions, embedded into materials, and used to seek out cancer cells and deliver treatments. They can accept photons and convert them into electricity at substantial rates and they are exceptionally energy efficient. Quantum dots research holds great promise to improve our lives.

It has always been important for authors and researchers to maintain and present accurate records of their work and experience. In this digital age, an author can achieve such record-keeping by using a persistent digital identifier, a number associated with a particular author that remains with him or her, regardless of changes in discipline, research project, organization, or position. ORCID, a not-for-profit-organization working to make it easier to connect research results to authors, has stepped in to provide just such a service. To date, they have registered over 2.5 million ORCID iDs for their users, and this number grows daily.